Cineplex Events has today announced that the widely popular Great Digital Film Festival will now be known as Flashback Film Fest. The event is Canada’s only coast-to-coast festival, bringing a line-up of sci-fi, fantasy and fan favourites back to the big screen. This year, Cineplex Events and renowned film critic, Richard Crouse, curated a line-up of 17 of the most blood-pumping, thrill-inducing and heart-warming films in cinema that will screen in over 24 cities across the country from February 3-9, 2017.
Please click here for a message from Richard Crouse and Cineplex Pre-Show Host Tanner Zipchen.
“We wanted to give the festival a new name that better reflects how it has evolved and why it has been so popular over the years,” said Brad LaDouceur, Vice President, Event Cinema. “Flashback Film Fest fits perfectly with our Event Cinema business which offers guests exciting, unique content that ranges from classic films to renowned stage productions. We take them on tours of famous galleries and put them courtside at sporting events without them ever having to set foot on a plane, or in this case, a time machine.”
“The great thing about this festival is that audiences will have a chance to relive these movies in the way they were meant to be seen; on a big screen, with an audience,” said author and film critic, Richard Crouse. “The best and most powerful way to see a movie is to fully immerse yourself in the theatre experience, surrounded by people who are enjoying it just as much as you are. I’m personally looking forward to seeing films like Fight Club, Blade Runner – The Final Cut, Pulp Fiction and Shallow Grave in all their glory.”
The 2017 Flashback Film Fest Line-up includes:
Air Force One (1997) *20 year anniversary
Blade Runner – The Final Cut (2007) *10 year anniversary/35 year anniversary of original
Blood Simple (1984)
Fargo (1996)
The Fifth Element (1997) *20 year anniversary
Fight Club (1999)
The Fugitive (1993)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Heat (1995)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Legend (1985)
The Princess Bride (1987) *30 year anniversary
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Running Man (1987) *30 year anniversary
Shallow Grave (1994)
Starship Troopers (1997) *20 year anniversary
Trainspotting (1996)
Tickets for festival films cost $7.99, $6.99 for 5 or more films and new this year film fanatics can buy the “I Want It All” pass for $69.99 allowing them access to all 17 films for a price of $4.11 per admission. For a complete list of show times, or to purchase tickets, visit Cineplex.com/FBFF .
Richard and Cineplex pre-show host Tanner Zipchen announce this year’s Flashback Film Festival! More details to come… in the meantime watch Tanner and Richard HERE!
In the 1950s, author Robert Schnakenberg’s father was the letter carrier who delivered jazz legend Louis Armstrong’s mail. “Louis would say, ‘Hi Mr. Mailman’ and sometimes Louis and his wife would invite my dad in for coffee. That is sort of my claim to fame.”
It also began a career Schnakenberg says involves “lurking around the edges of famous people.” The author of more than a dozen books, including The Encyclopedia Shatnerica and Christopher Walken A-to-Z, Schnakenberg’s latest is The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray, a weighty tome analyzing the life and career of everybody’s favourite Ghostbuster.
“They’re more history books than puff pieces about celebrities,” he says on the line from his Brooklyn home. “I wanted to approach them from a quasi or mock academic perspective and treat them as if they were historic artifacts rather than just pop culture icons.”
Murray was a perfect subject for the pop historian. “I had done two previous A-to-Zs and was looking around for a third person to round out the trilogy. I had visions of a three volume slip case edition in my head.”
Murray fit the criteria. “Who has a long career? Who has left a paper trail of interviews and profiles? Who has an off-camera persona that is just as interesting as what they do onscreen? It just clicked last year. He reached a point of saturation with all these viral videos going around that (the publisher) said, ‘Let’s do the book now.’”
The volume provides an overview of Murray’s long and varied time in the public eye. From critical appreciations of his films, to interesting trivia, The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray spans decades of fascinating behaviour.
“His career provides a lot of entry points for people who want to get into him,” says Schnakenberg. “If you came of age in the ’70s, the way that I did, you remember the Saturday Night Live version of Bill Murray. If you were 13 in 1984 you probably think of him as Ghostbusters Bill Murray. If you were a proto-hipster in the ’90s your image is probably the guy in all the Wes Anderson movies. Now people know him as the dishevelled guy who crashes people’s parties.”
The point is, for almost forty years Bill Murray has been a constant in our lives. “Bill Murray never had to come back because he never went away,” says the author. “He was always cool; just cool in different forms over the years.”
Traditional wisdom has it that January is a dumping ground for bad movies.
“Everyone is broke after shelling out for Christmas presents,” the studios say. “The weather is crappy and anyone leaving the house is going to the gym instead of the movies,” complain the suits.
That’s why clunkers like One for the Money, a Katherine Heigl crime drama with a two per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating and Season of the Witch — which saw Nicolas Cage go all medieval on the forces of evil and strain his credibility as an actor — made the lives of critics and audiences miserable on long, cold winter nights in bygone Januarys. Why waste good movies when no one was likely to go?
Years ago studios threw the odd quality film into the January mix — Traffic, Good Will Hunting, Before Sunrise, Dr. Strangelove and Silence of the Lambs—but every good movie like Matinee (92 per cent on RT) was balanced out with a stinker like Body of Evidence and its paltry six per cent rating.
There is still that yin and yang as last week’s releases of The Boy Next Door and Mortdecai (two movies that will decorate Worst Of the Year lists) proves, but the tide seems to be changing. Perhaps that’s why Project Almanac, a time-travel drama from producer Michael Bay, moved from a prime July release date to the barren January slate. Surely Bay, as savvy a player as Hollywood has, wouldn’t allow his movie to be tossed out with the trash.
The reason given for the schedule move was that Bay himself wanted to sprinkle some of his Transformers’ fairy dust to pump up the film’s appeal to young audiences. But it’s also apparent that a micro-budget movie like Project Almanac, even with Bay’s name attached, could get lost in a summer filled with large-scale offerings like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, so why not release in a less crowded, but increasingly profitable field?
What used to be a time to fill screens with borderline cheesefests has become a viable month to release a movie.
Last year big crowds braved the polar vortex to help the Kevin Hart comedy Ride Along set a January opening record. This year the Oscar-nominated Selma and Still Alice have opened wide in a month usually reserved for Golden Raspberry winners. Perhaps the biggest story of 2015 so far is the success of Clint Eastwood’s Chris Kyle biopic, American Sniper, which has raked in upwards of $170 million in just two weeks. The success of that film is as strong an indicator as Hollywood needs that January is no longer a no-go zone.
“Project Almanac” has a lot going against it. It’s a found footage movie with loads of nausea inducing wobbly cam, characters who deliver cheeseball lines like, “So you’re telling me dad left a time machine in the basement?” and an over-played climax that drags on too long but it gets one crucial thing right. And that’s enough to earn a recommend for young sci fi enthusiasts.
Boy genius David Raskin (Jonny Weston) inherited his smarts from his late father, an engineer who was working on a top-secret project at the time of his death. Buried away in the basement are the schematics for a time machine David and his best friends Adam (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn (Sam Lerner), under the constant camera surveillance of sister Christina (Ginny Gardner), discover and build.
After a few test runs they do what every teenage boy would do; they allow the most popular girl in school (Sofia Black-D’Elia) to talk them into taking a big risk with the new machine and use themselves as guinea pigs. It’s the power of the pretty girl to influence and shape the actions of teenage boys, and the movie gets this absolutely correct.
Do they use the machine to go back and kill Hitler? Nope. Save JFK? Nuh-uh. They do what young guys would do. They party at Lollapalooza, use their unique powers to get even with bullies and rig the lottery so they can win big, buy Ferraris and “hire Kim Kardashian to have my babies.” They may be geniuses but they are still concerned with the stuff of youth—girls and being popular—not changing the world.
The movie takes a serious turn in the last third when reality skews and the consequences of time travel become apparent. David must take things into his own hands, but even then, as sentiment and sci fi match and mingle, the movie doesn’t lose track of its teen origins.
Part “Groundhog Day,” part “Project X,” “Project Almanac” has all the annoying traits of found footage movies—“You’re getting all this, right?”—and screams out for a tripod, but for the most part is a zippy young adult sci fi story with equal parts brains and heart.
The tagline for Tom Cruise’s latest film is “Live. Die. Repeat.”
“How many times have we been here,” asks Rita (Emily Blunt). “For me, it’s been an eternity,” replies William (Cruise) as he relives the same day of an alien invasion over and over.
Edge of Tomorrow is a time-loop movie that can best be described as War of the Worlds meets Groundhog Day.
In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray says, “Every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender. I am an immortal.” His take on a drunk, suicide-prone weatherman who discovers the beauty of life by living the same day endlessly may be the granddaddy of all
Hollywood déjà vu stories, but many other movie characters have been caught in cinematic time circles.
The DVD cover for 2006’s Salvage asks the question, “What if every day you relived your own murder?” Originally called Gruesome for the festival circuit, the movie is as grim as Bill Murray’s film is life-affirming. Called a “digital video hell — spawn of Psycho, Eyes Without a Face and Groundhog Day,” by Variety, Salvage is the story of Claire (Lauren Currie Lewis), a convenience store worker who undergoes her murder over and over. Despite its extremely low budget — star Lewis doubled as the film’s make-up artist — Salvage was an official selection of the 2006 Sundance Festival.
The horror genre lends itself to time-bending tales. Camp Slaughter is a 2005 throwback to the slasher films of the 1980s. In this one, a group of modern teens stumble across Camp Hiawatha, a dangerous place where not-so-happy-campers are trapped in 1981 and forced to re-experience the night a maniacal murderer went on a killing spree. Labelled “Groundhog Day meets Friday the 13th (part 2,3,4,5,6,7,8… every one of them!),” by one critic, it’s gory good fun.
Not into gory? The Yuletide provides a less bloody backdrop for time-looping. The title Christmas Every Day is self-explanatory but 12 Dates of Christmas is better than the name suggests. Us Weekly called this Amy Smart romantic comedy about a woman stuck in an endless Christmas Eve, a sweet “nicely woven journey.”
Finally, the aptly named Repeaters is a Canadian film written by Arne Olsen, scribe of Power Rangers: The Movie. Repeaters is about a trio of recovering addicts who find themselves in “an impossible time labyrinth” after being electrocuted in a storm. Like most time-bending films, Repeaters is about learning from your mistakes. What sets it apart from some of the others are three unlikeable leads who use their situation to raise hell and break the law. It’s only when Kyle (Dustin Milligan) realizes they could be in big trouble if time suddenly unfreezes for them that familiar time-loop themes of redemption and self-reflection arise.
Forty isn’t old, but Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd, the leads in the new Judd Apatow comedy This is 40, are confronting middle age and not always liking what they see.
Mid-life ruts have supplied the basis for many movies.
The best-known age-angst film has to be American Beauty. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey, who won a best actor Oscar for his work) has a classic case of the mid-life blues. Depressed, he allows himself to be pushed around by his employer and his wife and he’s developed an unhealthy crush on his daughter’s friend. To restart his life, he quits his job, blackmails his boss and deals with his wife’s infidelity.
“I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the past 20 years,” he says. “And I’m just now waking up.”
Things don’t work out well for Lester, but weatherman Phil Connors’s (Bill Murray) mid life crisis has a better outcome.
At the beginning of Groundhog Day he’s a drunk, suicide prone curmudgeon who sums up his outlook like this, “I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.”
When he starts living the same day over and over again, however, he begins to see the beauty of life.
Bill Murray is also forced to reflect on his existence in Broken Flowers, when he receives a mysterious letter telling him of a son he didn’t know about.
“Well, the past is gone, I know that,” he says. “The future isn’t here yet, whatever it’s going to be. So, all there is, is this. The present. That’s it.”
Mid-life crises aren’t the domain of men, however.
In The Bridges of Madison County, Meryl Streep plays Francesca, an Iowa housewife who shatters the midlife doldrums by having a brief but meaningful affair with National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid (played by Clint Eastwood). Of her affair she says, “everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.”
The best-loved mid-life movie might be Shirley Valentine, the bittersweet tale of an English housewife who leaves her humdrum existence behind for a happier life in the Greek islands.
“I used to be The Mother,” she says. “I used to be The Wife. But now I’m Shirley Valentine again.”
